Celebrating 100 Years of Leadership for Liberal Education

By Kenneth P. Ruscio
Our Centennial provides a House Mountain opportunity, not only to reflect, not only to achieve that perspective that only some distance can provide, but also to return to our work in the years ahead, indeed in the century ahead.

By Mark H. Curtis
The Association of American Colleges came into being to provide a means for the besieged colleges to help themselves by taking counsel together about first things. Despite the vicissitudes of time and circumstance, AAC still exists to keep colleges and universities at the end of the twentieth century mindful of first things.

By Carol Geary Schneider
Since 1985, when Integrity in the College Curriculum was first published, AAC&U has focused extensively on each of the report’s major constructive themes and has also developed important initiatives on other topics developed in Integrity. What have we accomplished through all this attention to curriculum, teaching, and learning?

By Frank F. Wong
As we approach the twenty-first century, the traditional liberal education model, which has its origins in Anglo-European culture, needs to be replaced by an American liberal education model that has its origins in American culture and experience.

By Carol Geary Schneider
The ninetieth anniversary of the Association of American Colleges and Universities offers an opportunity for reflection. Where are we now in our shared commitment to the values and practices of liberal education, and where do we need to go, within the academy as a whole and within AAC&U itself?

By Johann N. Neem
University education in our country is increasingly not academic: it is vocational; it is commercial; it is becoming anti-intellectual; and, more and more, it is offering standardized products that seek to train and certify rather than to educate people. If and when we can no longer call the university a home, we will need to build new shelters in civil society.

By William Major
If we want clues to classroom dynamics in the "interface" between teacher and students, and between students themselves, then we might look to primatology, neurobiology, and cognitive science and advances in the understanding of empathic primate behavior.

By Colin Fong
If we as a community—his students, his colleagues, his friends, and his family—if we strive each day to recognize the needs of those around us, to make ourselves available to those who need us, to inform the way we learn and the way we live with opinions and beliefs that we don’t agree with, we will create the culture of higher learning he fostered his entire life.